Trauma is real and it is in the body more than it is in the mind. Read that again. Your body remembers more of your trauma than your mind does, because the mind has mechanisms to protect you from the reality of your trauma as needed.

You can sense something in your body, or have a fear or strange aversion to something, and not know why. It could drive you crazy. You have choices.

Our culture stresses talk therapy because we live in a culture that suggests we mentally understand in order to conquer through understanding. This is not healing. You do not heal by understanding, you heal by shifting. You authentically heal with a combination of somatic, cellular, energetic, mental, biological processes.

But it doesn't need to be as intense as we make it. I know because I have made it intense, and I have experienced also how it does not have to be intense. I have identified with the trauma and I have made it worse, and I have blocked my own ability to heal, and the pace of my healing, in doing so. I watch people do this ALL THE TIME. You create your reality with your mind.

Over-identification = longer healing.

There will be a choice point, or thousands of choice points along the way, in how you handle your next trigger in relation to old trauma patterning. You are likely close to one in your life right now. And even though there is the history, the story behind you, you have a choice in this moment.

And that choice, which is how to align in the mind with which part of the story you choose to align with, will determine your path forward.

Think string theory. Think free will. Choice is everything.

Make it conscious. Every effect of the existing trauma may not be conscious, because it's in the body, it's in your cells, and you carried it in from your DNA, but your CHOICE can be conscious.

Even though there is trauma, even though you are not going to bypass it and you are going to do everything you can to heal it, the degree to which you IDENTIFY WITH your trauma will be exactly proportionate to the degree to which you heal.

Keep repeating the same stories = stay in the trauma.

I have unpacked trauma from my body. It still comes in waves sometimes. This past week, I received information that pretty much confirmed conscious hypothesis I had for the last 22 years about sexual trauma based at first on body aversions, small snippets of memory, and how the trauma played out in my body. For example, there were years when I could not be far from a bathroom for fear I would pee my pants for lack of safety. As an adult, in every day life. No one really knew this. I kept it quiet, but I identified with the active trauma response daily.

During that time, not knowing exactly why I felt that way (in the mind), I started to somatically, emotionally, mentally, energetically really heal that trauma and over the last 5-8 years especially, and so when I got this new information this week, I knew had a conscious choice.

And I watched myself make it (meta-cognition = when the thinker watches itself). I could choose to identify with the trauma and go down that road (one string) or I could acknowledge the story as the story and honor the path that my body/soul have already taken down the healing road (another string) and continue there. Continue as the woman I have become. One path would be back through hell and back, and another would be to honor my feminine soul and exactly where I am. The STORY and identification with it could literally determine the course I took, and honestly, the next few months or years of my life. If I were not being conscious here, the default would be identification with the story, the fear, and the trauma.

Do you see what I'm saying? I share my story as illustration.

YOU DECIDE.

Trauma can feel like being engulfed in an ocean. You have NO IDEA what is under the waves that you can't see.

But you can put your feet down in the ground and sand. You can get wise as to how that ocean moves. You can feel your body even though you're inside the water, and you can realize that you and the water are the same, and that you actually are the one that determines the height and impact of the waves.

You are powerful. You are the creator of your life. You are not what happened to you. You have started on this trauma-healing path and are realizing this now.

It served to identify with trauma for a time, and you learned how to be resilient. But you are moving beyond that. If you identify with resiliency, you still identify with trauma.

Be the creator.

I work with empowered women who have experienced trauma in their past affiliated with religion or men and are breaking the patterns of trauma and victimization now. These women are rising. They are taking back their bodies, their love for self, their power as the creator of their lives. They are making loving and active decisions during times of intense awakening about how to shift the social programming of patriarchy and separation within their own bodies, their own relationships, and their own families. We are accelerating the healing of the trauma that has been a result of these patterns, and she is no longer interested in identifying with the reasons why NOT anymore.

OWN YOUR TRUTH. OWN WHAT HAPPENS FOR YOU NEXT.

I have space for two such women in my practice now. If this is you, I would love to support you now. PM me to set up a call if you feel in your BODY that the time is right, and tell me what that body clue was that let you know.

The year after my divorce, I went to therapy weekly. I had so much to unpack. All I knew was - I never want to be the woman that I was in my relationship ever again. That woman was judgemental, emasculating, and not in touch with herself.

And truth be told, I was terrified of actually living in my body. I had lost a child right before the beginning of that fourteen year relationship, and I realized how much of a safety net this man had been to me, and so I also started to unpack the trauma in my body. I pretty much couldn’t even imagine letting another man into my physical or intimate space.

There are a LOT of stories I could tell you about that year - how deep I dove, how the somatic therapy taught me to unwind the trauma in my system, how I took my mindfulness and spiritual practices to next levels. I dove into my personal work like I was the only project that mattered - because, determined - I was going to get my Self back.

When I started to date, it was terrifying, and it brought up all the ways that I was still holding trauma in my body - physically, emotionally, spiritually. Trauma memory gets trapped in the soma and whether we remember exactly why or not, other people trigger our habitual trauma responses. Intimacy brings up SO MANY trauma responses for so many people.

And SO MANY people are trying to go ahead and be intimate meanwhile suppressing the trauma responses. Check yourself - you feel fear and suppress it in some way before sex. You back away ever so slightly emotionally or physically when someone approaches you intimately. You fear all the ways you’ll get hurt when entering into a relationship or when bringing up something vulnerable. It’s really common, but not so much talked about. (But I'm talking about it.)

When I started to date, therefore, I was not getting anywhere close to intimate, because it just didn’t feel safe to do so. It literally felt terrifying to expect myself to share connection with someone else. Many people are simply not intimate or they are bypassing their body's warning mechanisms that tell them to stop, turning off their hearts and the potential for deep connection.

What ended up happening is that I spent the second year after my marriage, after a year of working out the trauma on my own, in an absolutely safe relationship that taught me how to go to the edges of my vulnerability, and what it felt like to be met there. When you have trauma in your body, you shake, quake, feel anxious in the presence of another - even if when you’re at home on your meditation cushion, it would appear as though you’ve got it all worked out of you.

But intimacy is just going to reflect the CORE of our wounding. You can do some work alone, and then the truest available healing is in the safe and intimate connection with another. To be met there is something incredible.

Because of all of the blocks that humans have to experiencing their own fear and vulnerability, I fear and I know that all too often, humans are not accessing this potential. I talk to couples ALL THE TIME that are coexisting without actually ever touching these most important places of the heart and healing. (The body plays a HUGE part in this!)

I am who I am today because of my dedication to my own healing and to my Soul, but also I am who I am in my body because of this man and his ability to safely, steadily, and willingly diffuse my energetic shaking and quaking until I could come to safety, ease, and stillness. Only then is actual intimacy and connection truly available - when our whole systems are available to access it.

To be a woman carrying the trauma of women - intergenerationally, ancestrally, sexually - as we do, and to be met safely in the hands of a man, is life changing. It is life giving.

Relationships have the potential to heal the deepest rifts to intimacy. I can teach you this. Men, I can literally teach you how to hold this space and invite her true sexuality forward. And I can teach her how to soften out of her perfectionist and emasculating tendencies that are also barriers to connection.

Through my years of deep exploration and training of trauma recovery, presencing, intimacy, and gender relatedness, I have developed coaching for couples that actually heals trauma, by teaching you both to meet one another in the vulnerable spaces, and to do so differently than anyone has ever counseled you before. This is not a methodology of talking it out, or hashing out the past. This is learning to be present in the moment, watching what arises, approaching vulnerable topics (including trauma in the body) with safety, and committing to the exploration. In this method, both partners are called to their best, compassionate selves. In this method, your trauma heals, separation heals, and connection skyrockets.

After you’ve reviewed my website, please contact me for a consultation to see if my in depth couples coaching is for you. It works when both people are committed to healing the disconnection because you desire so deeply to experience the fullness of your relationship’s potential.